Six scientists tell us about the most accurate science fiction in their fields - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5967064/six-scientists-tell-us-about-the-most-accurate-science-fiction-in-their-fields <comment><USER2> I'm disappointed nobody mentioned Primer.

<comment><USER3> Who WOULD mention primer? It's an excellent movie about how engineers work on stuff though</comment></comment>


Pure CSS collapsible tree menu - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecssninja.com/css/css-tree-menu <comment><USER2> Sorry to nitpick grammar, but this sort of stood out:

"Not contempt with any of those solutions I investigated doing it with pure CSS..."

(contempt -> content)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah thanks for that, it slipped by my proof reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is good enough to make me consider using it even with the browser compatibility issues involved

<comment><USER4> I don't know...IE9 isn't close to being released is it?

<comment><USER5> It's about to enter public beta... release is probably at least a year out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very nice. But--pardon my pedantry--there seems to be some HTML in this "pure CSS" tree menu.

<comment><USER7> Nothing about the HTML specifies this kind of menu styling.</comment></comment>


A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers (RFC 1149) - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 <comment><USER2>
       1 April 1990</comment>


Ask HN: finding partners for hobby/experimentation projects - <AUTHOR>

This is my first submission ever to HN - I mostly read (avidly) and vote (sparingly). I've been in the position for the past while where I have wanted to start on a project, or have even started, but always get bogged down when it comes to the design phase of it, due to my lack of design skills. Sometimes these projects are websites, or simple applications, but my skills in this area are basically non-existent.
Now, if I was looking to co-found something, I can see embarking on a more serious search. Yet for things you just want to toy around with and try out and see if they lead anywhere it's not as appropriate. This is exarcebated by the fact that all my friends are developers like me, so it's not hard for me to find development partners, just design ones.
So my question to all of you is this: say you have some project you want to try it out, or just experiment with something: how do you go about finding someone to work with when you don't know anyone with that skill set to begin with?
As a sort of "P.S.", if there are any designers looking to try things out, feel free to contact me. <comment><USER2> I will just say like everyone is, that you should start doing designing on Photoshop as much as possible but it takes time to learn design. I have been doing it since last two years and only now starting to create designs that I will use myself (since I am my own harshest critic).

I have although so far only done projects for myself but I'd love to try out new things if it's worth it.

Shoot me an email (on my profile page) if you seek any help.

<comment><USER2> Damn, why can't I edit my comment. I made a mistake in the first sentence itself. Just imagine I said "I will just say like everyone else" instead of what is written initially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm in the same boat. There is programmermeetdesigner.com but it doesn't seem to be used much. I'd love to have a co-designer/entrepreneur type cohort and bang out a couple projects.

</comment><comment><USER4> Take the DIY approach.

A couple suggestions: Get a Photoshop WOW book. This will teach you how to do the things you want to do graphics-wise.

Get a design book, the principles of design and spacing are fairly straight forward.

WikiMedia Commons: There are lots of great graphics on that site, they are all public domain. Combine these with the Photoshop WOW book.

Flickr: Learn to use the advanced search features and search for images that are public domain.

However, most importantly, iterate: Like great apps, great designs don't get there the first time. Use the wayback machine to convince yourself that it's ALRIGHT. Look at youtube's first iteration. It REALLY sucks.

Just make something and then ask people about it. You've got the perfect audience here at HN, throw the URL into an Ask HN and say, what do you think of my design?

Seriously, if you can teach yourself to program you can teach yourself design. There are a couple tricks to it but it's not really that difficult, like programming however it IS a lot of work.

Also, buy/find a template design and then rework to suit your needs. Check deviantart find something you like and talk to the guy about it, most of them will even do the work for you if you're willing to pay.

If you can find dev partners, become the design guy, problem solved. Plus, devs love to work with designers who can code.

Also, beg borrow and steal design ideas. Look at jquery-UI, jqTouch, etc, there are lots of pre-made great looking designs that will get you by.

<comment><USER5> Completely agree.

Grab a photoshop book and get going. Another book I'd suggest is Stephen Krug's "Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" if you want to get into it a little further.

If a site is easy and intuitive to use, people will use it. It doesn't matter if it is pixel perfect with respect to design.

Also, I would start getting a "mood board" together which is essentially a collection of designs, colours and whatnot that you like.

Just collect them together in a folder or better yet print them out and hang them on a board/wall. That way, you have a visual cue on where you're heading and it helps you out.</comment></comment>


Research Priorities for Artificial Intelligence: An Open Letter - <AUTHOR> http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter <comment><USER2> The research priorities document should be read first... [http://futureoflife.org/static/data/documents/research_prior...](http://futureoflife.org/static/data/documents/research_priorities.pdf)

without that the open letter makes almost no sense. The open letter is really just a way for the signatories to say "I support the research priorities document."

<comment><USER3> Right. The main author is Stuart Russel, author of "Artificial Intelligence - a modern approach", which is a major intro to AI text. Two main concerns are expressed - that AI, whatever it is, should be "beneficial" and "robust". Those are good points.

There are technical problems on the "robust" side. Most AI systems are still rather brittle. Machine learning systems are brittle in ways that are not well understood yet - small changes in input data can produce huge changes in results. There was an article on HN about this recently, showing mis- recognized images. The paper talks a lot about formal verification, but it's not clear that will help. "Robust", though, is an engineering problem, and can probably be solved.

"Beneficial" is an economic and social problem. That's going to be much tougher, because the political issue will be "beneficial for whom?" For discussion purposes, consider that a near-term use of AI is investment asset allocation. Machine learning is already being used in that area, but so far mostly for technical analysis. What will a society look like where AIs determine where investment goes, based purely on maximizing investment return? The concept of the corporation as having as its sole goal maximizing shareholder value, combined with AIs making the decisions to make it happen, is rather scary. Yet if such companies are more successful, they win. That's capitalism.

<comment><USER4> Russell is one author. The other is Peter Norvig.

<comment><USER5> Just to avoid confusion: Norvig is the co-author of AIMA, the AI textbook. The research priorities document that is the subject of this thread was drafted by Stuart Russell, Daniel Dewey, and Max Tegmark, though Norvig (along with many others) is signed on via the open letter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's hard to design any system (or research program for that matter) if the goal isn't well defined.

If the research is aimed at ensuring that AI is aligned with human interests, another priority should be researching what we deem those interests to be.

The Law and Ethics research section of the research priorities document is centered on mechanisms, with a couple of nods to policy, but with the seeming assumption that that question of what is in the human interest has already been answered.

But the answer certainly isn't obvious. Different sets of humans have wildly diverging and fundamental disagreements over what is right or wrong for humans and our future.

I doubt we're going to find a consensus in the time we have. It will probably make more sense to just have smart people define a set of good principles. This is hard enough that it should be considered a research task, and I would think it would be at the top of the priority list.

Otherwise, how do we know that the research we are doing on other problems even makes sense? If you just stub out the "human wishes" component of all this as one simple "human approves" button, then you haven't solved anything. We need a robust definition of what "aligned with human interests" means.

<comment><USER7> The current most-widely-accepted answer to this is "indirect normativity". This is basically saying that human values are complex enough that we should instruct an AI to study humans to figure out what they are, rather than try to program values in directly and risk getting them wrong.

I'd be a lot more comfortable if metaethics and related philosophy advanced to the point where we didn't have to rely on indirect normativity. But I don't think this is something you can just throw money and people at, because this is a field which is sufficiently difficult and hard to judge, that work which isn't first-rate tends to detract from progress by adding noise rather than help.

<comment><USER8> Indirect normativity is a losing strategy because you don't know what the resultant ethical system will be. [https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/indirect- norm...](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/indirect-normativity- write-up/)

Humanity has already solved ethics, so there's no reason for us to give up and ask AI to define ethics for us.

<comment><USER9> >Indirect normativity is a losing strategy because you don't know what the resultant ethical system will be.

That's the point...

>Humanity has already solved ethics

Where on earth do you get this idea?

<comment><USER8> Awareness of ethical systems. What makes you think ethics isn't solved?

Here's a relevant essay [http://medium.com/@yanazendo/how-to-be-lazy-and- successful-a...](http://medium.com/@yanazendo/how-to-be-lazy-and-successful- at-the-same-time-1c283c6880b3)

<comment><USER9> That's not even close to a formalization of human morality. Such a thing probably isn't even possible. See this: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And, not one mention of the fact that a huge portion of current commercial AI research is going into figuring out how to get people to click more ads or buy more things. "Deep learning" research at Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, and many others, is centered on advertising and commerce. They aren't calling it AI, but they're hiring AI people to do it and they're working with AI techniques and tools.

I consider this dangerous, in a way that I can't really put my finger on. Is it merely that some of the best minds in the field are being distracted by selling more crap that people don't need? Or is it that AI will have at its developmental core a model of inducing consumption as its prime directive? Or, am I just an asshole that doesn't like too many things?

<comment><USER11> As someone in the deep learning space who's not working at one of those companies (deep learning on hadoop with cloudera/red hat model is my game) I'd like to add here that while these labs are doing stuff with ads, it's not necessarily all that they are focused on.

I've visited a few of the teams and I'd like to say that many of the things being published out of there (say the recent real time vision stuff with cars published by yann lecun's group) or perhaps the voice stuff coming out of baidu.

That being said: I think you're ignoring the structure of the data that are involved with click through rates and the like.

Reconstructing sparse data and reccommenders is among the hardest problems in AI. Couple that with the at scale unstructured data(being media like text, audio) being used and we can see some real landmark results.

Real value is being created alongside some of the commercial research being done.

As for use cases of deep learning outside of ads, my customers are working on many cool problems that don't involve targeting. I've done training as well as deployments with a variety of companies now. Media centric products coupled with users are among some of the coolest datasets out there. Let me say that search and similarity among data is by far the best application of this stuff outside of yet another conv net classifier.

There's a practical side to this stuff that doesn't involve ads. I hope that helps a bit.

<comment><USER12> > There's a practical side to this stuff that doesn't involve ads.

Just have a look at the AIMA book ([http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/](http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/)), it's full of applications not related to advertising (both of its authors, Russell and Norvig, have signed the letter). I'm going to implement many of them in my blog ([http://ai-maker.com/](http://ai-maker.com/)), so if you want to have a lot of fun with AI, join me in this learning quest.

<comment><USER11> I did most of my first homework assignments out of that book a lot of years ago ;). I'm actually writing my own book on deep learning with oreilly now. Plenty to do ;)

<comment><USER12> I'd the thrilled to hear your story with AI and OReilly. It must be very encouraging to have this project with such an important editor.

<comment><USER11> Email's in profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really like their short summary of the automated driving problem:

 _If self-driving cars cut the roughly 40,000 annual US traffic fatalities in half, the car makers might get not 20,000 thank-you notes, but 20,000 lawsuits._

I'm convinced this is an area that deserves serious thought. I've mentioned it previously on here, but it's quite possible to develop "AI" driving software that make dramatic improvements to the overall safety outcome, but can be dramatically less safe than manual driving in certain (rare) circumstances. As a related example, there was a laptop manufacturer a few years ago who developed a "face unlock" feature, and neglected to train it on people with darker skin. That was unfortunate, but hardly life threatening. In a car it's easy to imagine much worse outcomes.

<comment><USER14> > the automated driving problem: >> If self-driving cars cut the roughly > 40,000 annual US traffic fatalities in half, the car makers might get not > 20,000 thank-you notes, but 20,000 lawsuits. > I'm convinced this is an area > that deserves serious thought.

My fringe opinion on this topic is that automated cars actually simplify insurance and liability considerably.

The case history of product liability isn't common knowledge, nor are maybe the history and fundamentals of insurance, but both areas are instructive. Each area hints that when accidents are caused by automated or designed processes, rather than spontaneous human decisions, everything gets a lot less messy.

Here's a case very commonly taught to law students around the country: [http://online.ceb.com/calcases/C2/24C2d453.htm](http://online.ceb.com/calcases/C2/24C2d453.htm)

In it, a coke bottle explodes, and Justice Traynor explains in concurrence essentially how the industrial revolution had shifted the optimal way to allocate the cost of freak accidents. There's a parallel shift for automation.

If you have manufacturers absorb all the risk and damage of accidents involving automated cars, then the incentives are in the right place. This doesn't work right now. You can't just automatically assign manufacturers all liability with manual cars, because after an accident you have to sort out how much of a dumbass or how drunk the driver was, with lengthy determinations as to percentages of fault for all involved.

Automation strips that whole problem out of the equation (so long as one party wasn't driving a manual car). It would drastically simplify liability and insurance in this area.

Corner cases where a highly uncommon set of conditions prompt accidents? We have those now. Look at all the cases about delayed recalls in the auto industry. They're almost all about whether they expected the set of conditions to occur or not. Companies already deal with these issues, because we're already using complex machines.

<comment><USER13> I _hate_ the liability view of error handling.

I completely understand that knowing failure rates and likely liability payout leads to manufactures being able to plan .

However, I think it is completely unacceptable to consider a particular type of predictable "accident" acceptable because it is rare.

I think standards and safety testing are needed as well as liability laws.

<comment><USER14> > consider a particular type of predictable "accident" acceptable

That doesn't actually happen in modern liability cases, because the system shares your intuitions.

If a car manufacturer's defense in class action lawsuit is, "Yeah, but it's only a few people," the court will bankrupt them with punitives on the spot.

This isn't about giving people a free pass to hurt small numbers of people, it's about assuming they're responsible when they make things that hurt people, rather than wasting time figuring out responsibility from first principles after every single incident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To be clear, this is research priorities for "given that we have proto-AI technologies, how do we manage the impact on society and make sure the full-AI tech doesn't do something vastly unintended."

Which is somewhat worthwhile, but presupposes the existence of general AI techniques, which is an incredibly low-investment area. Seriously, the amount of research being pointed at anything that's plausibly "full AI" in nature is miniscule. If anything it's lower than in the 80s (and maybe appropriately, given the lack of payoff for the more general work).

(I could go on in detail about how there is approximately zero research being devoted to, eg, automated refactoring of large codebases and other stuff that you'd expect to be absolutely essential to general AI. But I'll just stop with the naked contention.)

And it's rather silly to conjecture effects when you don't even know the order of magnitude of the timelines, the resources required, or the bootstrapability of the technology. There is a huge difference between "a Top100 cluster can emulate a human brain on a 1/100 timeframe" and "a cell phone possesses general-purpose optimization algorithms that are better at learning arbitrary tasks than your average human".

<comment><USER16> > I could go on in detail about how there is approximately zero research being > devoted to, eg, automated refactoring of large codebases and other stuff > that you'd expect to be absolutely essential to general AI.

the programming languages community has a fairly significant amount of effort devoted to automated re-factoring of large codebases, there is even a DARPA program for this: [http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Mining_and_Unders...](http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Mining_and_Understanding_Software_Enclaves_%28MUSE%29.aspx)

this isn't seen as "AI" work though...

<comment><USER17> That's the classic AI success story problem in a nutshell: anything successful from the AI field gets rebranded as something else.

<comment><USER18> In this case the situation is different. AI researchers didn't succeed at program analysis; they gave up. @fiatmoney is right: it's no longer considered an AI problem. But computer scientists haven't solved it either, because they keep bumping their heads against the computability ceiling. It's very clear to me that AI is actually required for general, accurate program analysis.

<comment><USER16> why? we get general and accurate program analysis all the time using just unification and simple inference rules...

<comment><USER18> No, you don't. You may be able to infer some properties of some programs, but you can't take an arbitrary program of real-world size and answer an arbitrary question of a kind that a human maintainer of that program would want to know; for example, under what circumstances, if any, it ever performs an invalid operation -- such as an array bounds violation, throwing a runtime exception, whatever is considered invalid in whatever language it's written in.

 _That 's_ what I mean by "general and accurate".

<comment><USER16> yes you can, in many dimensions. one of those we call "type checking". other examples are the myriad examples of using model checking and symbolic execution to identify errors in programs automatically. can you identify _all_ errors? no, but that has nothing to do with weak or strong AI. but you can definitely learn general properties about general programs using today's technology.

<comment><USER18> I'm certainly not saying that static analysis is useless; that would be an odd statement considering it's the field that pays my salary!

But there's still a very big gap between what we _can_ do and what we _want_ to do. None of the extant static analyzers found the Heartbleed bug, for example.

What I'm saying is that to close that gap will require AI. I don't think it's just a matter of better algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The attached paper ("Research priorities for...") reads like a white paper intended for an NSF program office, with the idea that it might be a skeleton for a research initiative and CFP from NSF.

I also have to say that it is a very bureaucratic response to a deep issue. It seems narrow in comparison with the scope of the issue. Maybe that's what happens when you get a bunch of specialists together.

</comment><comment><USER20> The tacit assumption here is that we can predict what aspects of AI will be most beneficial. But if you look at the inventions/discoveries that have most affected the world over the past few decades I think you'll find that they are largely unpredictable, e.g. the internet, computers, antibiotics, etc. It's actually difficult to find a non-incremental improvement that was planned. We have such a glut of scientists right now that it doesn't make sense to focus them in any specific direction. AI is a popular field and people are going to be working in it, regardless of whether we adopt a set of research priorities or not.

<comment><USER21> > adopt a set of research priorities

Try this explanation on for size: Have the whole group, with a lot of signatures, etc., come out with a big statement, a paper, a position, policy paper, on what the AI _research priorities_ are.

Then, presto, bingo, any prof looking for grant money can pick one or a few of those _priorities_ , adjust the direction of his work, and claim to both the granting agency writing the check and the journals to publish his papers that his work is on the _priorities_.

And just what is the solid basis for the _priorities_? Sure, that paper. And, reading that paper, it looks solid, right? I mean, it very much looks like the _right stuff_ , right?

Or, maybe an AI researcher wants to do something else. So, they can claim that their work is _leading edge, disruptive, original, crashes through old barriers, is better than the conventional_ , etc., right? And maybe that approach will get grant money, accepted papers, tenure, etc.

Sounds to me like a way to help get grants and get papers published and, thus, to keep the _parade_ , _party_ , whatever going.

Meanwhile, back to good engineering, etc.!

That is, if the paper looks weak for its claimed, obvious purpose, then maybe look for the most promising non-obvious purpose! E.g., some people are good at manipulation, and some people are gullible. Or, "Always look for the hidden agenda."! Or, don't be too easy to manipulate!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was in a group that did some research in AI, worked with several famous companies, met lots of smart people, wrote and shipped some software, published a lot of papers, gave a paper at an AAAI IAAI conference at Stanford.

Summary: The good papers at the Stanford conference were really just good cases of traditional engineering, statistics, etc. Anything like _artificial intelligence_ (AI) beyond just such traditional approaches had next to no significant role. By then, AI just looked like a new label for old bottles of wine, some good, some bad.

The "Open Letter" and the paper it links to look like more of the same: The solid, promising work is traditional approaches in good engineering, statistics, optimization, etc. The rest presents severe problems in specification, testing, verification, even security.

Maybe the best thing to do with AI that is not just good engineering, etc., that is, software and systems that are built but not really designed or well tested, is at least to be careful about security and keep the thing locked up in a strong padded cell and, especially where any harm could be done, take any of its output with many grains of salt and as just a suggestion.

It appears that, bluntly, we just do not have even as much as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue about how _intelligence_ works, not even for a kitty cat.

When I was in the field, an excuse was that _artificial intelligence_ was not really our work or our accomplishment but only our long-term _goal_. Hmm ....

</comment><comment><USER22> The challenge isn't creating the "Intelligence" but creating a virtual "Environment" that trains the artificial agent to do tasks that learn and alter its environment.

With a purely computational environment, all tasks - that can be learned/mastered - can be reduced to basic complexity classes, e.g. prime factorization. To our "natural" intelligence, this seems a contrived skill but consider...better prime factorization would allow the artificial agent to mine all the bitcoins, break passwords, etc making the AI a very rich "in the real world". And compared to a human calculator, even the worst computer looks like a super-intelligence in this domain.

So to learn the skills we consider important, there needs to be a way to make the AI experience and alter a non-virtual world - the physical (macro) world we live in…basically some physical robot that does I/O from the environment to the intelligence. And until the AI has some reason to optimize for behavior in the non-virtual world - have the most kids instead of have the most bitcoins -natural and artificial will remain alien to each other as neither will recognize the others' reality.

With this insight, I'd diagnose the bottleneck in AI to be in engineering robotics at least as complex as insects, to which we're a long way off.

<comment><USER23> Complexity doesn't solve problems. Making our robots more complex isn't going to make AI smarter, it's going to make it more confused.

I think your 'insight' is likely to be a false analogy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If anybody has interest in working on some of the Econ-related issues, please tweet me at @brandonjcarl

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the top priority should be how a hierarchy of weak AI agents can form strong AI with the ability to rewrite its own notions and not become unstable.

I've seen very little about this, except for a video where (as I recall) a multilayer neural network can be trained while holding certain connections at a constant value. That way the network can be trained to do different tasks and then put back into those modes by setting those training connections to various values during runtime:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU)

Eventually another neural net could be trained to know which values to hold to get different behaviors. It sounds like one of the goals is to reuse logic for similar tasks, and eventually be able to adapt in novel situations like our brains do. I believe there was also a bit about how time figured into all of this, but I haven't watched it for a while.

Anyway, I'm thinking that a lot of what we've learned about version control systems like git could be used to let an AI brainstorm in a sandbox and replace its own code as it improves, and always be able to revert or merge if needed. Throw in some genetic programming and decent lisp machines with 1000 cores and we could really have something.

When I think about this sort of "real work", as opposed to the daily minutia our industry gets mired in, it makes me sad inside.

<comment><USER12> This aggregation/collaboration of weak agents... isn't it boosting? It's certainly a recommended approach to building robust systems, see Pedro Domingos' paper (tip number 10):

[http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/cacm12.pdf](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/cacm12.pdf)

But I had the impression that the letter had a more transcendental feel than just focusing on a particular tuning technique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm glad to read such positive attitude towards AI... I recently discussed in another thread if AI was indeed pushing people into the unemployment lines (an opinion from an MIT Tech Review). Link as follows:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866253)

Parent: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863279](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863279)

As I said, I am so firmly convinced that AI has so much good to do that I just created a blog ([http://ai-maker.com/](http://ai-maker.com/)) solely dedicated to AI and its applications, and I'm going to dedicate my spare time for the following years to grow this side project into something awesome, because that's where AI is leading us.

<comment><USER26> You have posted _four_ links to your blog just in this thread. Forgive me if you find this rude, but I think that's at least two more than necessary.

<comment><USER12> Sorry for that. I just found it appropriate for each of the different sub- discussions (and I just removed one of them). When threads get massive with text, I sometimes miss interesting stuff and I didn't want this to happen to other readers.

I'm starting this side project and recently HN is on fire wrt AI. I'm seriously willing to put a lot of time in this, and the more people I can help the more I can learn.

Sorry again if that bothered you or any of the other watchers here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I propose Brian's Law - any AI sufficiently advanced to learn faster than humans would learn from human history and stop talking to us.

</comment><comment><USER28> In Silico Cognitive Biomimicry: What Artificial Intelligence Could Be [http://genopharmix.com/biomimetic- cognition/in_silico_cognit...](http://genopharmix.com/biomimetic- cognition/in_silico_cognitive_biomimicry.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> Mimicking a portion of human cognition should be #1. For example:

What do you think of when you think of the word "sky"? Our machines and algorithms need to produce an answer similar to yours.

<comment><USER23> We don't want computers to be as dumb as we are. We already know how to make human brains that can answer such questions poorly; what good does it do to have a machine do it too?

<comment><USER30> There are cases where it would help to have realistic simulations instead of real humans. E.g. artificial companions, negotiations, public relations, or experimentation that would be unethical on living humans (unless we end up with a theory and evidence indicating that machines can be sentient). Or there may be some huge task that would benefit from having trillions of "people" working on it.

<comment><USER23> That's true, but there is no known way to verify proper operation of those kinds of machines. What happens if your artificial companion stops liking you? What if your negotiation robot throws a tantrum?

Well, then the robot isn't doing what we want it to do. But you asked for human behavior, and that's what you got. There is not really any point in making robots do what humans do. We want them to do what humans can't do -- even if we want them to seem human while they do it.

Addendum:

>(unless we end up with a theory and evidence indicating that machines can be sentient).

I think we'd sooner find a theory indicating that sentience is either not well-defined or not a useful concept for making decisions. If we found that ants were sentient, we'd still step on them and not care.

This kind of talk is exactly the kind of reason I feel most people are useless for understanding ethics: you can't make decisions based on the answers of arbitrary grammatical yes/no questions. It's the same reason mathematicians don't really care if P=NP is true or not. You can just suppose one way or the other and you'll be no better off without a proof.

The value in the proof is an advancement in conceptualization and language. Similarly, an important advancement in ethics/morality/AI will very likely make your concerns about sentience obsolete in a way that should be obvious to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Out of all the things to worry about AI is at the bottom of my list. 3rd world countries, declining air quality, war, ect. are all things more deserving of our time and energy.

<comment><USER8> Wrong. You underestimate the power of AI. AI profoundly affects economics, since economics is fundamentally computational.

<comment><USER27> I think a plain wrong is mistakenly assuming you both have the same definition of AI.

I suspect the parent comment meant "of all things, an Intelligence Explosion by general purpose AI", which to be fair even the group set up here to study do not seriously believe in.

You are right in that It's almost impossible to deny the impact that some AI research has lead to - but that is the field of AI not the existence of "real" AI.

You might both be talking past each other

<comment><USER7> > I suspect the parent comment meant "of all things, an Intelligence Explosion > by general purpose AI", which to be fair even the group set up here to study > do not seriously believe in.

The question of whether there it will end up actually happening is unclear, but my understanding is that FLI takes the possibility of intelligence explosion pretty seriously.

This is a difficult question to meaningfully engage with, without a lot of background research. Nick Bostrom's book "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" is a good entry point into the subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Disclaimer: maybe I'm not the target audience of this letter.

What a terrible letter. Hemingway grade is "20, bad".

451 words, but the only hint what the authors wants is "We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do ... In summary, we believe that research on how to make AI systems robust and beneficial is both important and timely, and that there are concrete research directions that can be pursued today." But, reading this, I just think, "Sure, that sounds good."

There's an attachment (which I won't read), but it would have been nice if the original document contained some information what the point of this is so I'm motivated to read it.

<comment><USER7> The attachment _is_ the letter.

<comment><USER33> Link: [http://futureoflife.org/static/data/documents/research_prior...](http://futureoflife.org/static/data/documents/research_priorities.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Australian Kids Make Shkreli's $750 Daraprim Drug for $2 per Pill - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/dec/01/australian-students-recreate-martin-shkreli-price-hike-drug-in-school-lab <comment><USER2> It's irresponsible to claim that somebody who synthesized a chemical has made a wholly saleable product. They are not fungible.

</comment><comment><USER3> This amazing YouTube chemist named NurdRage has been working to make Daraprim aka Pyrimethamine from household chemicals for I think years now. He made his own (chemical) path from what he can get to what Daraprim is, and shares his opinion about the kids.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd7hXFnSHZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd7hXFnSHZc)

tl;dw: They used lab grade materials from chemical vendors.

</comment><comment><USER4> this is amazing, is the formula open source? I wonder if we can crowdfund mass manufacturing

<comment><USER5> How is it amazing? Nobody ever said producing medicine is expensive, being able to sell it is.

This is at best a puff piece attempting to defame Shkreli instead of pointing the blame where it belongs.

<comment><USER6> You are going to get downvoted, so take this upvote for speaking the truth</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SuperFormatter CLI – Standalone Template Renderer - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/guilt/0e70d2ab07ea9b7f03646595af642325 <comment><AUTHOR> Okay, so this exists for few reasons:

1\. Get a template CLI working on most distros without initially making a binary.

2\. Few dependencies: I used SuperFormatter because it seemed to have the smallest usable template language. If not using yaml config files, it runs on stock Python;

3\. Unixlike cat|sed functionality.

Of course, I am open to suggestions on better alternatives for more portable/standalone template commands.</comment>


Intel Sharpens the Edge with Skylake Xeon D - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/02/07/intel-sharpens-edge-skylake-xeon-d/ <comment><USER2> Pretty good timing for me. I am hoping to expand my homelab and other than my pfSense router and FreeIPA box (both on C2000) everything else is on the older xeon-d's. I may not move to the newer ones (looking at what supermicro has listed I see a lack of a board with a x16 PCI-E slot) and the power requirements of the new Xeon-Ds look disappointing to me. Shall have to see.</comment>


Ask HN: I work from home and I'm expecting a kid this year, I need pro tips - <AUTHOR> I work from home and occasionally travel. My wife an I are expecting our first child this year and I'm curious what pro-tips other remote employees with kids have. <comment><USER2> Father of 2 who were born 11 months apart. So I have a few pro tips for you:

1\. One of you (your wife or you) needs to be fully available for taking care of the baby. If both of you need to go back to work right away (probably in America), then you will need a good Nanny who has experience taking care of infants.

2\. You cannot wing it. Infants need a lot of attention even though they just sleep and poop all day. Again, one dedicated person needs to be there for them.

3\. If you work from home, even with a dedicated caretaker, it will be ideal to have a closed door office/room where you work. You cannot work with a baby close by unless you absolutely have no choice.

4\. Depending on your baby, you may have many sleepless nights in the beginning. It cannot just be your wife doing the sleepless nights. She will need your support which translates to "waking up randomly to check on your baby who is crying in their crib"

5\. Do some research on this horrible thing called SIDS. Hopefully none of us never ever have to deal with it but it happens to people. Protect your baby as much as possible against SIDS by following a few basic but important rules.

6\. Make a list of chores that are needed specifically to take care of the baby and divide the work between the 2 of you. Don't leave things for guessing even though be willing to change things at last min. Pro tip: No matter how much you plan in advance, a baby will make you change things at the last minute. Nature of the beast :) but still plan.

7\. Family Support: If you can, get help from immediate family as needed for both emotional and physical support. You may not realize but even a 30 min. break away from the baby can do wonders to your emotional well being. Babies are tough and they will test your patience. That's ok. Just learn to find some time away from all of it. Family members specially moms/dads are the best way to address that if you are lucky enough to have them close by.

8\. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Don't worry about things too much and most babies turn out fine. So enjoy the little moments with them as they will grow up so fast that you wouldn't even believe it. You can never be a perfect dad or mom. But you can be a dad. Just be there. Show up. That's the most important thing. All the best!!

<comment><USER3> Regarding point 1, I would recommend one parent becoming full-time parent and forgo work. My wife stayed at home to raise our two daughters (both in school now). Creates a better dynamic for the children and for the parents, these aren't times you can get back.

<comment><USER4> If you decide to do this, take it seriously and treat homemaking as full-time work. Make regular payments into retirement and disability accounts in the stay-at-home parent's name. If you envision longer-term SAH parenting, make time for them to attend first aid, outdoorsmanship, pedagogy, home repair, etc. classes on occasion. If both parents will be at home, try to find activities that will allow you to have conversations with other adults outside of your family unit (occasional "continuing homemaker's ed" classes like those mentioned previously can help with this). Have a plan to ease back into the workforce gradually as the kids get older or suddenly if you suffer a financial shock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have two kids and have worked remotely since before they were born.

1\. Try to take as much parental leave as possible initially. The baby stages are so much fun and no matter how much time you spend with them before going back to work, you'll wish there was more.

2\. Don't expect to be able to watch your child and work simultaneously. I have done it in limited fashion (kid is sick/daycare closed etc) and it can be very hard. This mainly goes for the younger years (< 5).

3\. When you travel, dedicate time to Skype/Facetime with your child.

Congrats on becoming a parent! It's seriously a blast and I wish you and your wife the best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> My wife luckily works in the school system and gets a pretty decent maternity leave for the US. I was planning to take at least a month off, possibly half time for a few months.

Re: FaceTime, is that for you or the baby?

Does a baby understand that's you on the other side of the screen!!? I wonder if there is research on this. That's interesting.

<comment><USER6> Kids get FaceTime and video calls way easier than voice only. My kids (2,4,6) are completely uninterested in a voice only call, but when I FaceTime them we can have 15-20 minutes of interaction.

When it's voice only my kids will still try and show a picture to the phone, etc. and when we tell them it's just voice and the person can't see them they just ask why not.

I'll add my own memories to the anecdote: when I was a kid my dad's family would call from overseas. Even though my Arabic was passable, my grandma wouldn't get more than a hello, I love you, and I miss you out of me. Why? The sound quality sucked, the timing was off, and I couldn't really picture my grandma in my mind while talking. If there had been FaceTime in 1988 it wouldve been a different story. In 2005 my Arabic was WAY worse but our conversations way more expressive even with crappy video.

I travel a few days a month, those 15 minutes of FaceTime when I get back to the hotel probably do more for me than them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spend the money on an office space close to home if you can. I pay ~$350/mo for an office that's a 10 minute walk from home. So I get to see my kids during lunch, and don't waste time commuting in the morning or evening. The physical separation helps me maximize quality time with family. If your headspace is filled with work while you're at home or vice versa, then nobody will feel like they have your full attention, which becomes very stressful for all involved. Clear boundaries really help.

<comment><USER8> Solid advice. I'm the guy for the other huge comment. I absolutely considered renting an office at 5min walk from home. I almost did that (but in the end I moved and am working in the office). OP should consider that too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> if you have a significant other to help, it makes all the difference. If it's just you—forget about it. Not exaggerating. You'll need a babysitter / nanny.

work remote, 3 kids, wife takes care during the day.

I should also add that if your wife / husband is going to be the primary caregiver, youll have to adapt to their lifestyle/emotions and not the other way around. Child rearing (especially boys in my experience) is way harder and more stressful than writing code all day.

One last thing - it's a hell of a lot of fun, and my kids, the oldest of which is 6 dont know it any other way. I think it's healthy for them to be around us all day.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you both work, find a reliable nanny. I was naive and thought I could watch the baby while working. That lasted a day.

When the baby is about a year old, you're going to want to guard any valuables, including work equipment, with a tall fence or closed door. Babies love to use what they see mommy and daddy using, and they are not gentle.

Don't be afraid to take a healthy amount of paternity leave if possible.

<comment><USER11> Good point about guarding breakable things.

I can't type with my 16-month old on my lap because she just pulls the keys right off the keyboard. That caught me off guard the first time it happened. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Congratulations!

From my experience after the initial first two weeks. I would start work in my closed door office. My wife was only alone to gchat me if needed something. Obviously if it was an emergency, she could yell or come into the office.

When my wife went back to work 3 months later, I still worked at home. 3 days was ananny, and 2 days my parents. It was really refreshing for me to be near by with a new nanny. The nanny and my parents knew they could only chat me.

Working remote, you get to spend more time with your child, it's so awesome and you are not tired from the commute etc.

It helps that I'm extremely disciplined and I followed all the rules. Ultimately, it worked out fine. It's a little bit of adjustment money, work and relationship, but it all works out. Just when you think you got a system down, they start walking!

Regardless if you are work remote or on Mars. I can't emphasize enough taking a "Daddy Bootcamp class" that is generally offered at most hospitals.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have to see if Kaiser has one of those!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would highly recommend adopting some form or organization and productivity process as you have a lot less time after having kids.

The original GTD book from 2001 has some great ideas on how to get everything together and stay on top of things.

Practice writing down a list of things you need to do the night before, so when you start work you can hit the ground running. If you are programming, try using something like the Pomodoro method. There are apps to facilitate this.

If you do not have a dedicated office area, I would highly recommend setting on up if you have the room.

batch cook, and buy in bulk to save time.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just cosleep and have your wife breastfeed on demand in the bed. It'll make it so you can both easily sleep through the night. It made the first year of my daughters life really low stress.

<comment><USER15> I know the recommendation is against this. We did it with three kids. Everyone got to sleep. The transition is hard to their own bed, but way less hard than what I hear from others who stay awake all night caring for babies

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What hours do you work? I've worked from home for over 5 years now and had a kid last year. I work in the evenings from 5pm til very late and my partner isn't working, apart from her two full-time jobs of looking after two kids (baby and me :D).

This works out great for us as we can do things together during the day and then I can go to my office at 5. There can be a few interruptions until the wee girl gets to bed at about 7 but I don't mind, I usually welcome them.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I'm not traveling I work intermittently throughout the day. Usually 6a-6p with a few 30-60 minute breaks to do errands, go for a jog, etc.

<comment><USER16> Oh yeah that could be a little more demanding as you'll be near working the whole time your kids awake. Well after the "I'm going to wake up every couple of hours" phase :D

And I just thought of something that we've used a lot to help with sleeping. An amazon echo next to the bed which we use for white noise and some kids music occasionally. It's handy putting the wee girl to bed and "Alexa play white noise" while you're lying her down.

And as she's gotten older there are a bunch of kids skills on there too. We've been having fun in the mornings with the animal sounds skill lately. Totally worth the investment

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Take at least a few weeks off and make arrangements at work that you might respond to work much slower than usual.

You might still be able to work, fewer and less predictable hours. I was able to work some time between feedings while the baby was asleep throughout the night while my wife slept. Someone has to feed the baby, wash the bottles, etc the entire day/night. Plan for that.

Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER8> First months are fine (given, of course, someone can take care of the baby while you work!).

Once the baby starts understanding more about the world, he will not be able to understand why daddy is locked in that room. He knows you're there, he wants to play with you. He doesn't understand the concept of work. He will bang the door very frequently. They love doing it while you're on phone meetings because they can hear your voice, so they remember you and go banging the door right when your microphone is open. They also learn to open doors pretty quickly when it interests them.

If you're working close to where there's a person taking care of the baby and the person is not his mom or someone you absolutely trust 100%, every time the baby makes a single noise your primate brain will focus on it. Maybe a cougar caught him! I had my mother-in-law taking care of him during the mornings, and although I trusted her, I knew she did not have the reflexes to properly ensure he wouldn't get hurt while he was learning to walk properly (~1 year). He would occasionally fall and hurt himself and cry. Absolutely EVERY SINGLE noise he made (even when it was not falling) would completely put me in "alert mode" and I would focus on him, not my work. I could only be able to better focus on work once my wife arrived home and started taking care of him. But it was still not 100% attention on work: I would still hear all his sounds.

The fact that my mother-in-law was taking care of him while I was at home working meant I had a lot of interactions with her. And let me say that: it felt like I was married with her, and not with my wife. The big problem is that I _really_ would never ever marry someone like her! This was a major source of stress. And she did a lot of thing I didn't agree she should, and my wife didn't have the balls to challenge her because she was already helping us so much, so this ensured everybody felt uncomfortable (although, of course, I am thankful she indeed helped us so much).

In the end my wife quit her job and now I'm working in the office. This is not only because of the reasons above, there are other external reasons. While I'm at the office I can fully focus on work while knowing that my wife is doing everything she can to take care of him. And I won't hear noises that my primate brain will interpret as "your son is dying". Still, I attend early morning meetings from home and he occasionally visits the office while he shouldn't (the office door can't be locked, it's a rented house and I can't change it).

On the other hand, he cries every single day that I'm abandoning him while I'm going to work and it doesn't matter how many times I try to explain it, he doesn't understand why I won't play with him all day like his cool mom does.

No matter what you do, you're wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Intense! In retrospect would you have gotten a coworking space or started going to the office earlier?

How long were you at home?

<comment><USER8> Coworking space was impossible for me. I work with lots of confidential stuff, nobody can hear my phone calls nor see my screen, etc.

I considered renting a super tiny apartment 1 block away from home.

I moved to the office when he was almost 2 years old.

Thinking about that whole situation still makes me stressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Father of 3 and a freelancer who used to work from home. The monthly fee I pay to have a spot in a co-working space is the best money I spend. I should add that my commute is a 20-minute walk each way, so I get built-in exercise as well without needing a vehicle.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great advice in this thread. As the father of a 3 year old and long time remote worker: infants and small children do not comprehend why you are starting at that screen and not paying attention to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like my kids to have a pretty screen free early years, so I think it'll be important to not have them see me staring at one all day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you're around your wife too much she'll get sick of you and leave you.

</comment><comment><USER11> My wife and I have 6 kids. I don't do remote work, but I can give you some protips on the aspects of parenting that I think help a house to run well.

(I don't think having 6 kids especially qualifies me to weigh in here, raising 1 or 2 kids can easily be just as much of a challenge as raising 6! Raising kids is hard!)

Mostly, I want to encourage you to be purposeful about a few things:

1\. Be in your child's life.

I want to reiterate the suggestion others have made that having either you or your wife in your child's life full-time is probably the single biggest thing you could do for them. Children desperately need their parents' involvement in their lives. (There's another ditch to avoid here which is to make your children's lives your entire world. Your kids need to understand that the world doesn't revolve around them, but that they are unmistakably important and special to you.)

2\. Start with the end in mind.

What kind of adult are you aiming for your child to become? How will you get them there? What values do you hope will define them? Answering these questions up front can make the in-the-moment decisions you will be faced with much easier to make. (e.g. "No, you can't go to that party because your room isn't clean." is something said in service of teaching a child responsibility.)

3\. Don't be afraid to _tell_ your child who they are.

Don't be too "hands off". Teach your kids _your values_ and instill in them what it means to be a part of _your family_. It's popular these days to view kids as if they are just fully-formed tiny adults with their own preferences and desires who need to be consulted before any decision is made on their behalf. _Children need to be molded_ into mature adults, it doesn't happen naturally. Sometimes they want things that are harmful to them and it's your job to disagree with them and tell them why they aren't getting their way. Maturity doesn't just come with age. Your job is to build an adult out of the pile of goo which is a 2 year-old screaming at the top of their lungs in the middle of Walmart because you didn't let them chew the used gum on the bottom of the cart seat.

4\. Love your wife more than you love your kids.

This is good for you, good for your wife, good for your kids. You're embarking on a tough journey (raising a child into an adult) and you need a travel partner who will go the distance with you. She'll get tired and need your support, you'll get tired and need her support, and you'll both get tired at the same time and you'll each need to know that you're both in it for the long haul.

5\. Guard your family's sleep schedule!

Babies often come out with their days/nights mixed up. Opinions are mixed on how and whether to have play/eat/sleep/change schedules, but I'll just say that we did Baby Wise and all of our children were happily sleeping through the night by 6-8 weeks old. That pays HUGE dividends. If you and your wife are well-rested, you'll be giving your child your best parenting. If the baby follows a schedule, it's much easier to tell what they need when they are crying.

There's lots of other good advice in here and it's great that you're seeking it out! Don't be afraid to ask people around you for help. It's a hard journey, but worth it!

<comment><USER21> Lots of great advice here, thanks for sharing. Regarding #4, I firmly belive that one of the best things a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I worked remotely 3 or 4 days a week when my first child was born. A lot of this is repeating what's already been said but doing so in order to add more data points to the advice ;)

\- First, a big benefit of working from home is if you have flexibility in hours. You've going to have a lot of sleep deprivation and unusual hours. I would let my wife sleep in the evening and until the early hours whilst I looked after the baby, sometime working whilst the baby slept strapped to my chest (because that's pretty awesome). Then I'd hand over the baby at about 1am/2am and sleep in a bit but still start work on time. And no commuting means you get back to help quicker.

\- If you don't have a closed door office space at home then it's probably not going to work. With a wife and baby in the house there are a lot of potential distractions and you need to have discipline to lock yourself away regardless of if the baby is crying or making cute noises. For most people it'd be impossible to intensely focus on work if you're in the same space.

\- Have that discipline and agree terms with your wife, such as set work hours that you shouldn't be interrupted during. Get good headphones to block out the sounds from the house. Be clear about any deviations to the schedule, so that they don't set expectations.

\- If work allows, remote working allows for spontaneous deviations to the schedule. With kids you're no longer eating out in the evenings so lunch is the new dining focus. An occasional long lunch with the wife & baby is really nice for everyone.

\- If you have a closed door office space you have a time limit on how long it'll work. Once object permanence kicks in (about 6 months) they know you're somewhere and might react to that. Once they walk they'll find your door and call/bang for you. Once they can open the door by themselves you've got an uninvited guest on your conference calls!

\- So if you can, finding a close by co-working space is worth investing in, even if not used everyday. I did this once we got to door opening stage. It allows you to focus on work and have a good separation of work and home life. Even a 10 minute walk home gives you a mental divide so that you're not in work mode when you start interacting with wife & kids. Find a desk in a nice & social place. I found a media agency with spare desks and that was great. (My company insisted I use Regus first and that was a total nightmare. Never use Regus!)

\- When you get home from work don't expect any time to 'unwind' from the day. I know guys who expected 30 minutes before dealing with baby & child stuff. WTF! Your wife has been 100% baby focused all day and needs a break, help or adult conversation asap!

\- Working and looking after children at the same time does not work. It's not satisfying to anyone, so keep the focus on one thing at a time.

\- If you can part time for a bit then do so as it'll be a great help for your wife, as being a 100% baby minder 5 days a week sends people insane!

</comment><comment><USER23> Hi! I feel like your question is almost directed at myself :) I'm a new parent with a 5-month-old and I started a remote software dev job pretty much right after our daughter was born. My wife and I also used to be avid travelers before this. I'm a dev with 13-years work experience in Silicon Valley, and have worked for companies big and small, including being a cofounder for a YC startup.

1\. On work, set expectations with your partner that working from home doesn't mean you're available to do baby chores all the time; although you can do it occasionally to help out or in small emergencies. Assuming you have a dedicated room for your office area, you can set up some basic rules of expectations -- for example, door open means you're working, but can be interrupted if needed; door closed means you're in a video meeting or something and shouldn't be interrupted.

2\. On your partner -- remember that baby care is a tough, more-than-full-time job and if she's pumping, that's easily a double full time job. (My daughter never learned direct feeding so my wife pumps 100% of time) In such a scenario, you may want to consider hiring a nanny, during the time of your work hours on week days. Otherwise, you're possibly looking at dedicating 30 minutes to look after your baby every 3-4 hours (whatever is her pumping frequency -- but usually every 3-4 hours to start with), and can disrupt your work a lot.

3\. I don't know your company's paternity leave policy, but you should try to take the first 2 months off, even if some of that time needs to be unpaid. The first 2 months are tremendously hard. Even for 2 people, full time, you're still going to run on 3-4 hours of sleep a day, just to take care of the baby and keep the house running and have food. Alternatively you could hire post- partum doula and maybe later on a nanny, and you can go back to work earlier as soon as hired help starts. But if you have the option to take time off, you might as well do it -- yes it'll be harder than working, but your baby will have more bonding with you and be closer with you when she's a few months old. Moreover, the first 2 months are very hard on the mom. The emotional stress and physical work are overwhelming. Share as much of it as you can! For us, since she pumps, I try to do more of feeding and diaper changes. That becomes less possible when you start work, which is why you should take more time off at first.

4\. Since you mentioned travel -- expect traveling to be minimal and not easy for the first few months. Even now at 5 months old we find it pretty difficult to be in a car ride for more than an hour or so. Babies have short attention spans and need a lot of holding and carrying for comfort, which isn't possible when a car is moving. On top of that, if mom is pumping, that makes scheduling time to go out even for a couple of hours pretty hard. Don't expect much traveling for the first 6 months.

I can add on to this post some more as I think of more stuff. Feel free to ask any specific questions you have too.

Congrats on the baby! Definitely share as much of the baby care work as possible, outside of your work time. Putting the baby to sleep at night is a very good routine for dad to do -- you're free at night, and it's a tough part of the day that mom can use a relief from.

<comment><USER11> Good advice, and I love your last tidbit in particular.

When I take on bedtime chores, my (stay-at-home) wife gets a second wind to accomplish whatever tasks of her own that she's been hoping to get to but has had to put off all day because she was taking care of the younguns. It's a great solution because the kids and I get time together, I get to share in the caretaking chores, and my wife gets a much-needed respite from managing 6 other people's lives for them.</comment></comment>


Australian groupon clone makes founders overnight millionaires - <AUTHOR> http://delimiter.com.au/2010/09/10/jump-on-it-makes-founders-overnight-millionaires/

<comment><USER2> You think it's already too late to start making other localised Groupon clones?? e.g. in U.K. or wherever??</comment>


Ask HN: Why are Covid-related peer-reviewed articles flagged down? - <AUTHOR> I'm talking about this article (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/) which seemed legit, from a relatively well-trusted and official source. The discussion that got flagged down can be found in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662574 <comment><USER2> The article is fine. But it's unrelated to the current crisis, and has proved a fertile basis for conspiratorial confabulation among people anxious to find someone to blame for the coronavirus.

Specifically, the paper does _not_ describe the construction of a novel virus from HIV and SARS, as has been claimed by such scientifically literate publications as the New York Post. The paper describes the assembly of proteins from the SARS coronavirus and some of its close relatives, as a way of testing whether such recombination _in vivo_ , as occurs in coinfection of a single host by multiple strains, would be likely to enable a strain previously not infectious to humans to become so. The only way such a constructed protein can in any way affect human cells is in a plate, with extensive lab support. The protein isn't a virus, and cannot become so. It's the biological equivalent of a unit test, rather than of application code.

The trouble is that you need to be able to follow the paper to understand that this is the case. If you can't, and you're already frightened enough to be foolish - or inclined to tendentiousness for some other reason - then it's very easy to incorrectly conclude, based on the 10% of the words in the abstract that you do understand, that the current pandemic is the result of, at minimum, an accidental release of a pathogen deliberately created in a Chinese laboratory for some negligent or nefarious reason.

To be painfully clear, that is false. Everything about that is false, and the paper supports absolutely none of it. But a lot of people are pointing to it as though it did, and that probably explains the flags.

<comment><AUTHOR> When all this will be said and done people/international organisations will have to look at this with fresh eyes. Just look at this Rai3 reportage from 2015 [1] (RAI is the Italian national television), where starting with minute 5 you can see a piece on Chinese scientists "playing" with that horseshoe bat coronavirus mentioned in the study, trying to combine it with another animal's not deadly yet "polmonite" (pneumonia in English).

Again, this is not fake news, and we're talking about the Chinese scientists still giving it a go 8 years after that first study I was linking to and 5 years before a global pandemic that consists in the exact two things they were studying (coronavirus + pneumonia), originating in the exact same city where those scientists were based.

Saying that all this is just a "coincidence" or "paranoia" or a "conspiracy" is pure lunacy.

[1] [https://www.rai.it/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-5e32...](https://www.rai.it/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-5e3275ba-475c-4cf4-b402-1e27dc47565b.html#p=39)

</comment></comment><comment> jerome-jh From what I can see there is a flagging epidemic on HN. I have seen valid statistics about flu (from the CDC or equivalent, I am not a US citizen) being flagged, on the ground of being conspiracy inspired. But knowing the actual numbers is not conspiracy. I too had my "ahah" moment when learning about the flu statistics.

Some subjects simply cannot be discussed: there is a Paul Graham's blog post about it. That is a bit sad that the moment, however urgent, dictates what can talked on a pretty harmless forum.

<comment><USER2> There is a misinformation epidemic on HN and lots of other places, and part of that has been the use of flu stats to tendentiously argue everything from "the current measures are an overreaction" to "REX-84 FEMA black sites New World Order". It's possible you are mistaking flags on such tendentious claims for flags on raw data presented without interpretation - the latter of which, I'll admit, I haven't really seen anywhere lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The one you were linking to was probably flagged for the flamebaiting title

Which is great, because misleading titles is one of the bigger problems here on HN, made worse by 90% of people not reading anything but the title and the comments

</comment><comment><USER4> Probably raised a "conspiracy theory-prone discussion" red flag in enough HN- ers.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's live here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663029)

Sometimes people see the older article second and flag it as the dupe.

</comment><comment><USER6> Covid overload</comment>


Fork Over Passwords or Pay the Price, New Zealand Tells Travelers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/world/asia/new-zealand-passwords-devices.html <comment><USER2> Same discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112734](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112734)

<comment><USER3> What a very good way to put it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Easy peasy, I would pay $3000 to bring my terrorist organizations nuke plans from NZ in the dropbox folder where i downloaded them from instagram. Because that's how real terrorists do it.

<comment><USER5> but they won't look at cloud storage (honest - the law even says so) so why don't you just leave those plans on the server until you're through customs - of course than you have to go to all the trouble of, ya know, clicking a hyperlink...

<comment><USER6> You seem certain that they won't look at cloud storage. I say Snowden revelations suggests we assume they can look at cloud storage. Even if NZ can't, US or EU or whoever else has access will share with an allied state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> But this is okay! After all if you are not breaking the law, you have nothing to hide, and no reason to feel worried! Privacy is smoke screen criminals are making up to obstruct the justice!

<comment><USER8> Also, if you aren't rich and can't afford security work arounds, your paltry bank accounts can't be seriously injured by bad government actors who might be tempted to sell your info to identity thieves.

<comment><USER9> All I know is that this makes me feel safer, because as we know New Zealand is _the_ number one target and nexus of international terrorism. With this move, I suspect peace will break out in the Middle East within days, weeks at most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure how it works with other password managers but 1password allows you to set certain "vaults" to travel mode.

See: [https://support.1password.com/travel- mode/](https://support.1password.com/travel-mode/)

<comment><USER8> Good to know. Does LastPass have such a feature?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tedious but doable is wiping devices before arrival, so they end up seeing a "stock" device with no personal data.

I'm rather surprised to discover on my Lineage OS 14.1 phone, that Settings > Backup & reset > Factory data reset > RESET PHONE does not actually delete everything like the description suggests: following such a reset, I still see files in the Files app when I click on my phone model: all of those directories still contain files and photos. So...yeah.

In theory when reformatting from TWRP, the mkfs should come with a trim command that ought to blow away all user data and the cache. But the thing is, you have to know what to format because Android has so many goddamn partitions.

Next chapter is when they demand you give them your social media account credentials. What you don't have a Facebook account? Liar! Off to prison!

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the smarter terrorists will easily find ways around this. For instance by encoding the secret info inside of publicly accessible images via Steganography: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography)

</comment><comment><USER12> hm, won't be going to NZ any time soon as a result. shame, i hear it's beautiful.

<comment><USER5> or you could go and, GASP! leave your phone at home...

<comment><USER13> You cannot "leave" your passwords at home

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And just like that, New Zealand has entered my list of no-fly countries.

<comment><USER15> Part of the plot. See _The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan_ in Bloomberg online from a month ago. After all, they have their underground NZ bunkers and everyone else should just go away. /s (just kidding)</comment></comment>


New on Daring Fireball: Display Ads - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/2017/07/df_display_ads <comment><USER2> I have always felt that Daring Fireball makes such good decisions regarding ads, _yet_ I can't think of even one other site that opts for a "sane ads" model. I wish they all would. I suppose the reason is that it would require more hands-on interaction with sponsors?</comment>


Ask HN: At what stage do you start talking about your startup idea? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean you start talking publicly about your idea on websites like HN.</comment>


Ask HN: What CMS options are there with good localisation support? - <AUTHOR> I've been trying to find a relatively flexible CMS that supports localisation of everything (e.g. both in templates and in generated content), but I haven't found a huge amount of options. CraftCMS seems to be the most straightforward one I've found so far, but what other options are there? Language doesn't matter especially, but it does need to be fairly easy to customise/extend.
I'm sure there's a WordPress plugin for it but I would really rather not go there again :)
Very grateful for any suggestions! <comment><USER2> Drupal content supports translations, or language neutral.

The site administration is also translatable.</comment>


ShiftJS – Swift to JavaScript transpiler - <AUTHOR> http://www.shiftjs.com <comment><USER2> I love Swift and work on the web, so I would love to see a serious Swift to JS compiler. Unfortunately, this isn't it.

One major part of Swift is its value types; many core types, including arrays, are passed by value, like a C struct. So

      var a = [1, 2]
      var b = a
      b.append(3)

should make `a` equal to [1, 2] and `b` equal to [1, 2, 3]. ShiftJS eschews these semantics and instead passes arrays (and other value types) by reference, which makes it basically impossible to share code between real Swift and ShiftJS.

Also, the demo compiles

      let a = 3 4

to

      var a = '3 4';

which doesn't instill confidence.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious, when are these kinds of compilers truly useful?

Maybe its my own ignorance, but language design often doesn't map 1:1, so wouldn't it end up feeling forced?

<comment><USER4> I have successfully used Haxe in isolated cases to build games for WebGL and Canvas. I think transpilers are most useful when you rarely want to reach outside of your own code, or you only need to rely on a few key libraries that are known to be well supported within the ecosystem of your transpiler language. I also struggle without a static compiler, so for my case it makes sense to use a transpiler, even with all of its pitfalls.

If there is one thing however that I have learned from using transpilers it is that externs as a whole are a huge waste of time, as it can be difficult to determine their quality upfront. If you are building a Node backend or SPA, you are going to need to rely heavily on existing libraries and will probably find yourself constantly hitting walls while you try to swim against the current of the ecosystem if you try to use a transpiler.

<comment><USER5> I disagree about externs being a waste of time for Haxe. I've written several, and they've been instrumental in helping me understand a codebase, and manage an upgrade process.

Haxe has a lot of metadata mechanisms that enable mapping language-specific semantics to Haxe standards (@:selfCall, and @:native for example). Haxe also has abstract types, which enable automatic inline runtime conversions (e.g., converting a native type to a standard Haxe type automatically depending on usage in haxe methods).

It's true you can't expect to find a high quality extern for a given version of any given library. However, it's pretty easy to write a small one for the subset of functionality that you require. It always ends up paying off for me.

<comment><USER4> I should have elaborated a bit more on this point, and I mistakenly used the wrong terminology. I was thinking specifically of Typescript type definitions when I wrote about externs, and was meaning to refer more so to the concept in a general sense (across all transpilers). That said I do use a number of high quality externs with Haxe (the Pixi.JS one is excellent).

I agree with what you say about writing your own externs with a subset of the functionality, and I think it is often a better approach than relying on potentially flakey externs. Still I think this sort of workflow is only suited to particular types of projects and especially in a team environment it makes more sense to avoid niche ecosystems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The true "Swift in web" will happen when WebAssembly is ready and LLVM has a WASM backend. Then I can just compile my Swift to WASM and bypass JavaScript altogether because Swift is already a LLVM front-end.

<comment><USER7> And then you need to wait for browsers to support it...

<comment><USER6> Browser support landscape has changed. The only concern is Safari but I'm optimistic

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 8-9 months without any update to codebase is not a good sign for most open- source projects, especially when both JS and Swift are marching quickly. This alone can turn me off on this.

</comment><comment><USER9> It doesn't seem to handle some pretty basic swift code:

        var a = 3
        let b = { a * 2 }()

[http://i.imgur.com/D1FxZcN.png](http://i.imgur.com/D1FxZcN.png)

<comment><USER10> Same here, tried a basic loop and it broke:

for i in 0...10 { print(i) }

Then again, the project does say it's in early development. Perhaps a re-visit in a month or two will yield some nice progress.

<comment><USER11> If the projects GitHub page is anything to go by, I doubt that. The only thing that's been changed in 9 months is the readme, and the change was to remove the note about the project being in "active early development".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why didn't they fork the actual swift compiler that does all the lexing, parsing, syntax checking, type checking, SIL generation, LLVMIR generation, and add a final phase that compiles to JS?

This whole project seem like a lot of duplicated, wasted (and error prone) work

<comment><USER13> Wondered the same thing. I thought maybe a sil to js project could be a good target, keeping enough semantics to be able to be smart in the generated js code, rather thab llvmir.

I looked for such a project a few days ago but didn't find anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do wish people would stop using the term transpiler as if there is something novel or different about source-to-source translation.

If you're taking a higher level language and compiling it to assembly, it's a compiler.

If you're taking a higher level language and compiling it to LLVM IR, it's a compiler.

If you're taking a higher level language, and compiling it to another higher level language...it's a compiler.

I am not sure where this term was first coined, but we've been doing source- to-source compilation for a very long term and it's just within the last 7-10 years I start hearing people use this term, which IMO adds no actual value.

It's perfectly fine to say "Swift to JS compiler".

<comment><USER15> I agree with munificent. 'Transpiler' implies very similar semantics between the source and target language; 'compiler' implies fairly different semantics (where a translation between the source and target is not obvious).

<comment><USER16> Some people treat C as portable assembly.

Does that make gcc a transpiler for converting portable assembly to platform- specific assembly due to their similar semantics?

<comment><USER15> I knew someone would bring this up.¹

GCC is an optimizing compiler, at which point all bets are off for obvious/trivial translation between C and asm. You could, hypothetically, write a optimizing TypeScript _compiler_ that emits asm.js.

However, while you can reasonably argue C started as a portable assembly, significant differences like a type system, pointer arithmetic, a calling convention, etc, exist now. I don't think it's unreasonable to say C is significantly higher-level than assembly.

1\. My parenthetical at the end was anticipating this—then again, the translation between C and asm frequently _is_ easy, albeit tedious.

<comment><USER16> I guess you could replace gcc with a dumb compiler / turn off optimizations. And throw in compiler intrinsics while we're at it, after all people write hot loops with them. And pointer arithmetics actually translate nicely to all those fancy addressing modes you find on x86.

And in the other direction one could argue that those so-called "transpilers" actually compile from a higher-level language when you consider complex type- inference and static type checking. Optimizing is not all a compiler does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From their examples.

Swift: var n = m--;

JS var n = --m;

Forget that ++ and -- operators are deprecated and not available in Swift 3.0; simple but profound mistakes like this do not instill confidence at all.

<comment><USER18> Also, --m and m-- are completely different. One decrements first and returns the new value, the other returns the new value and then decrements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hope these sort of madness of everything to JS goes away with the advent of webassembly.

<comment><USER20> Or just goes away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> FWIW:BuckleScript([https://github.com/bloomberg/bucklescript](https://github.com/bloomberg/bucklescript)) is to my knowledge the only compiler which compiles an existing language(not a language designed for compilation to JS) to JS without name mangling.

It is a serious piece of work, the compiler is compiled to JS too, so you can play it in the playground(even work offline): [https://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js- demo/](https://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js-demo/)

It also generates very small code output, for example `hello world` is 20 bytes instead of 100K bytes

</comment><comment><USER22> The holy grail would still seem to be the opposite: writing native iOS apps in JavaScript.

<comment><USER23> I haven't tried Reactive Native or other options, but my gut tells me it's less safe to write in Javascript than Swift. What would be an advantage that outweighs that?

<comment><USER24> Less safe in what sense?

<comment><USER25> Type safety & all that jazz. Swift is a much more powerful language than javascript (and typescript) is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This has a very similar name to the Japanese text encoding, Shift_JIS. I doubt people will be confused since these are two different domains, but they sound very similar to pronounce.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure if the examples are actual results from the transpiler, but there are semicolons in the Swift code which are not necessary unless you have multiple statements on the same line.

</comment><comment><USER23> How I would love to be able to write front-end code with all the safety checks of Swift, and have it transpiled on a commit hook or something! Wonder how this could work converting to React?

<comment><USER28> Have you seen [https://www.typescriptlang.org](https://www.typescriptlang.org)?

<comment><USER29> flow ([http://www.flowtype.org](http://www.flowtype.org)) is also an alternative. Developed at Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is a cool project. I wonder what inspired the developer to make this and what could be some use cases for this? I could see it being used a tool for learning.

<comment><USER31> First there was "everything that can be written in JS will be written in JS". Now it's "everything that can be compiled to JS will be compiled to JS".

<comment><USER32> "Everything that has been written in JS will be rewritten in every language that transpiles to JS"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Are there other ways to use other languages in the browser asides from transpiler, and asm?

<comment><USER34> Yes, read the browser docs, many browsers support languages other than JS.

However, if the browser only supports a given language than the final target must be that language, similar to how only machine code executes of a CPU, everything else is just a turing machine emulating another turing machine.

<comment><USER35> Where many = IE, and other languages = VBScript (if that's even supported anymore)?

Because that's the only actual and in use browser I can think of that supports a language other than JS natively.

<comment><USER34> Chrome supports ActionScript natively, as well as C++

<comment><USER35> No, it doesn't support either.

ActionScript is only supported through the Flash plugin, and inside the Flash environment -- and even that is taken out altogether in the new Chrome release.

C++, not at all. Except if you mean Chrome is written in C++ itself, or you can use Native Client, which again is another plugin like environment.

So, nothing similar to JS at all.

Might as well have mentioned emscripten, which does end up running as a web page.

<comment><USER34> If you install Chrome it supports these things, that's 'native' to me.

Does it act like JS? No, but its still native.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It would be interesting if it first converted the swift code to TypeScript then JS

<comment><USER15> Why would that be interesting? Presumably a Swift compiler handles its own type checking.

<comment><USER37> TypeScript would be a simpler translation target because it's very similar to Swift, and then TypeScript could handle the translation down to ES6, ES5, ES3, etc. Why reinvent what's already available?

<comment><USER38> TypeScript is merely JS with added type annotations, annotations which are stripped off when it compiles to JS.

There's no usefulness of TypeScript as a target for a compiler for Swift, because Swift already has static typing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> someVar++ and -- is deprecated already.

I wonder why doing this. What's the applicability of doing this? Will this applicability still remain valid when WebAsembly hits with a real swift binary?

</comment><comment><USER40> That's an unfortunate name. Way too close to Shift JIS, an encoding for Japanese characters. IANAL, but it seems close enough to warrant copyright issue.

<comment><USER35> First of all, if it's the name of a an encoding there's no "copyright issue".

Second, nobody (except the Japanese) really gives a duck about Shift JIS (and not many people care about Shift JS either) to warrant anything on either side.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can I send people on FB messages when we aren't friends? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm just wondering why can anybody send messages on FB to others when they are not friends, and when their privacy settings is that only friends can message them.
All I had to do to send a message to a person who wasn't a friend is click on "new message", a box popped up, in the field "to:" I copied the username from the url on that person profile, and then append "@facebook.com" and the message was sent, when I checked my messages page, a message was sent to that person and his picture and name on FB were shown.
Is it intended to be like this? <comment><USER2> _I'm just wondering why can anybody send messages on FB to others when they are not friends, and when their privacy settings is that only friends can message them._

Are you aware that they have the setting that only friends can message them because they told you so? Some people set their own profile settings to allow being messaged by nonfriends. For a while, at least, I had mine set to allow messaging by friends of friends. (Indeed, I see I still have my profile set that way.) It's up to each user to decide, and if I remember correctly, Facebook's defaults allow for more rather than less messaging. If indeed the person whom you messaged has a profile set to not allow messaging by nonfriends, and you (a nonfried) were able to message the person, that is a bit of a puzzler. Are you receiving replies to those message?

</comment><comment><USER3> By default, these messages will not go to their inbox. It will go to the "other" box (aka spam :) so unless the user will go in and check it manually they will never see it (no notifications etc.)

</comment><comment><USER4> It is probably the "email" feature, and not a real "message".</comment>


Show HN: Mock-proxy – API mocking at the network level using ICAP - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hashicorp/mock-proxy <comment><USER2> Any reasons I should use this and not hoverfly?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know about hoverfly when I wrote mock-proxy, but the proxyserver mode looks like very much the same strategy.

One feature mock-proxy has that hoverfly lacks is first class support for git repositories as an endpoint type. This can simplify the mocking process if what you're mocking is an HTTP git clone.

But overall hoverfly looks a lot more feature complete and super polished, thanks for telling me about it!</comment></comment>


Show HN: A fun web CLI for watching YouTube videos with your friends - <AUTHOR> http://tunetab.us/r/hackernews <comment><USER2> Pretty cool, I like this quite a bit. It would be cool to add an option to '/sl "terms" 5' and have it paste out the title of the top 5 search results and then allow a /1 or /5 to add that song to the queue, the top search term may not always be the one you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> i added a search feature, works pretty well!

<comment><USER2> Been using this off and on, I like it. I wish there were a way to turn off the no-repeat mode... I want to play the same song more then once after a few hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, I thought about this too and will take out the history feature. I originally put it there so the auto recommender wouldn't get stuck in loops, but kind of unnecessary with the new search.

thanks for using it! I want to add one more feature (user ability to lock a room so only they can submit and skip), and fix some stability problems, and then it will be "feature complete" in my mind. need to find the time, been busy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> just for fun, git repo here: [https://github.com/odinecse/tunetab](https://github.com/odinecse/tunetab)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks to whoever clicked through and played around, found a bunch of bugs i didn't encounter myself in my logs! also some ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> deployed some bug fixes, new ideas, new features</comment></comment>


Ask HN: developer resources for your favorite SAAS services ? - <AUTHOR>

To make it easier to build apps on top of SAAS services, we're starting to gather developer resources on http://kingapi.com (eg: http://kingapi.com/details/madmimi).
The idea here is to help people selecting a service by linking to resources that show how someone already used it, technically.
So we'll focus on third-parties how-to's mostly, such as blog posts, screencasts, more than company provided content (although this is still interesting, but we'd like to avoid "duplicating" the service website).
We'll fill this ourselves (Sébastien Gruhier and me) but if anyone wants to help, we welcome suggestions warmly :) (either here or directly on the site).
Thanks for your help. <comment><USER2> The NewsCred Platform just launched our API, but all how-tos (including company supported wrappers) are on our own site. Feel free to link to them though if you want: <http://developer.newscred.com>.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Live links:

<http://kingapi.com>

<http://kingapi.com/details/madmimi></comment>


'Eyewire' Game Trains Computers To Map the Brain - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2013/07/10/70000-have-played-eyewire-game-that-trains-computers-to-map-the-brain/#

<comment><USER2> Is there a discussion of the gameplay?

I'm hesitant to just sign up to play for something that may not be interesting. The subject matter is fascinating, but the gameplay might not be.

<comment><USER3> There's a Youtube video on the site that shows a little bit of the 'gameplay': [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpSA3_ZFWB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpSA3_ZFWB0)</comment></comment>


Satya Nadella's Email, Decoded - <AUTHOR> http://expletiveinserted.com/2014/07/13/satya-nadellas-email-decoded/

<comment><USER2> I notice none of the parts about changing management and employee evaluation tactics came through your translation. To a Microsoft insider, is that just noise, or do you think that Satya will improve the way management is done at MS?

<comment><USER3> The fiscal year _just_ ended and employees haven't even had their first evaluation in the new system yet. (One could argue that the new system is just more of the same, but I don't agree yet; certainly I think it's too soon to tell.)

Or maybe I misunderstood your question.

(Disclaimer: Microsoftie.)

<comment><USER2> You understood it right - thanks.</comment></comment></comment>